Mobile handsets have an inherently impoverished graphical user interface (GUI) with respect to the desktop. Small screens and tiny keyboards are typical of mobile handsets that fit in your pocket. Recent so called smart phones have introduced the use of a touch screen in an attempt to simplify the user experience with his mobile handset. For instance, the touch interface of the iPhone® has revolutionized the mobile handset industry and brought whole new mobile user experiences.
In existing smart phones, application programs (AP) may be controlled using touch inputs. Different touch inputs may control the AP in different ways. For instance, using the example of the iPhone®, the desktop GUI comprising a plurality of AP icons may be seen as an AP itself. A user touching an AP icon will cause a control of the desktop GUI that will launch the AP corresponding to the touched icon. A sliding motion across the desktop GUI, or a drag touch input, will cause another control of the desktop GUI that will display another set of AP icons hidden so far. The user gets a feeling that he is browsing through pages of AP icons to select an interesting application program. A prolonged touch input or clutch input on any AP icon will cause all icons to start shaking around their position. The control associated to the clutch input opens the desktop GUI management. Then the user can delete applications from the desktop or move them around in the desktop layout.
If such a method facilitates the user experience, there is still today a lot of scope for innovation using touch interfaces of electronic devices, mobile or not.
Indeed, user experience on desktop GUI and touch interface GUI are quite often very different, to the advantage of the desktop GUI. Selection of a portion of the GUI, or of the whole GUI like a screenshot, is an intuitive operation on a desktop GUI. Quite often, desktop keyboard does possess a clearly identified “screenshot” key allowing a user to make a screenshot by pressing this one key. Comparing to a touch interface like, for example, Android™ GUI, same result is obtained by pressing two buttons at the same time, and a user will not obtain such result if he has not previously read carefully the user guide as said gesture is not intuitive. It could even be considered as counter-intuitive to go through action of pressing buttons for a GUI mainly based on touch gestures.
Selecting a portion only of the GUI on a desktop GUI is also quite intuitive using a pointing device such as a mouse. Most of the desktop GUI (and desktop AP) reacts to a maintained left click on the mouse followed by a displacement of the mouse by selecting a rectangular portion of the GUI defined by the initial position (i. e. when the left click was detected) of the mouse cursor on the GUI and the actual position of the cursor according to the user displacement of the mouse. On the contrary, on a touch interface GUI, a user may not obtained so easily a selection of a portion of the GUI. For example, on a touch GUI, a user may need to make a screenshot of the entire GUI and then crop the obtained screenshot to the desired portion of the GUI as there is no intuitive way of directly obtaining a screenshot of the desired portion.
More generally, other touch inputs could be used to increase the user experience with touch screens or panels, especially on the selection of portion of GUI.
There is still a need today for a simple an intuitive selection of a portion of a touch interface GUI. There is a further need for novel user experience when selecting portions of a touch interface GUI.